[NTLUG:Discuss] RH 8.0 Crontab problem fixed by full system reinstall!

[Kenneth Loafman]

jay linux wrote:
> Thanks to all who gave me great help on solving this. I learned quite a 
> bit.
> 
> I had a different problem that I could not correct (reboot failing) so I 
> reinstalled from
> scratch. First thing I did when I got back up was to test crontab - it 
> worked. I suspect I
> screwed it up somehow but since I haven't logged in as root much I find 
> it strange. Particularly
> since the root crontab was failing too.....
> 
> The reason i rebuilt was because I did the following while playing 
> around and could not
> get a reboot to work afterwords. I suspect few people bounce around 
> between init levels
> like this in real life. I wanted to see what functions became available 
> at various levels so
> it was a good exercise for me. But I think I uncoverd a bug.
> 
>> >From my user shell su
>> shutdown now
>> successfully went to single user mode
>> init 1 - this worked
>> init 2 - this worked
>> init 7 - When I did this I got a GUI and log in prompt. I logged in 
>> but the screen went blue and
>> never came back. Must be a bug in the init program, etc
> 
> 
> Can anyone tell me the best channels to report a bug like this? I won't 
> be verifying it's repeatable for a few days because I want to get some 
> work done before blowing my system away again!!

Check the 'man init' and 'man inittab' docs -- runlevels 7-9 are not 
documented.  Runlevels 0 & 6 are maintenance, 1 is single user, and 2-5 
are varying levels of multiuser.  You got what is normal.  The highest 
runlevel you should run is 5 in normal situations.  I would suspect no 
one has set up 0,6,7,8,9 except in special circumstances.

...Ken